As disclosed by the Stoor U.S. Pat. No. 4,867,168, in the past training of personnel for the inspection of flaws has been done with the aid of test blocks having artificially implanted defects where the trainees carry out the scanning of the block with a conventional ultrasonic probe. To remedy the defects of this procedure, the Stoor patent stores in memory actual inspection data gained from scanning a structure containing defects. Such data in the form of ultrasonic waveforms are then retrieved on an X, Y coordinate basis when a simulated transducer or probe is scanned over a test body.
The foregoing technique is a significant improvement over the previous technique of utilizing actual test blocks containing flaws. However, the technique of the Stoor patent does not come close to duplicating an actual ultrasonic inspection. One of the reasons is the time delay in retrieving the data from the memory; in other words, a real time type of display is preferred. Another problem was the lack of a simulation of skew angle (around the Z axis) along with the X and Y position of the ultrasonic transducer.